Unreliable Narration in "The Great Gatsby" Author(s): Thomas E.

Boyle Reviewed work(s): Source: The Bulletin of the Rocky Mountain Modern Language Association, Vol. 23, No. 1 (Mar., 1969), pp. 21-26 Published by: Rocky Mountain Modern Language Association Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1346578 . Accessed: 27/12/2011 07:18
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

Rocky Mountain Modern Language Association is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The Bulletin of the Rocky Mountain Modern Language Association.

http://www.jstor.org

UNRELIABLE NARRATION IN THE GREAT GATSBY

THOMAS E. BOYLE

ThomasE. Boyle (A.B., Universityof Richmond; M.A., Ph.D., University of Illinois)has taughtat the University of Illinoisand at AlbionCollegeand is presentlyan associate State College. He professor of Englishat Colorado has publishedarticleson Whitman,Melville, and ThomasWolfe in Discourseand in Modem Fiction Studiesand is currently at workon a critical Loren the AuthorsSeries. United States biography of Eiseley for Twayne I know you will accept my remarksin the spirit in which they are I wish it didn'thave to be this way, but in what other offered-arrogance. spiritcan I tell you how to read a novel you have alreadyread? It is unlikely that we will ever agree even on the standardby which The Great Gatsbyor any otherliteraryworkis to be judged. This novel, for example, has been interpreted as if it were metaphysics, sociology,and intellectual One would never know from much that is writtenon Gatsbythat it history. is an aesthetic as object (or better-process)standing, Eliot said of the poem, somewhere betweenthe authorand the reader. The more criticsI read the moreconvincedI becomethat standards are to literarycriticismwhat faith is to religion. My argument, however,is neithera lamentover the diversity of criticalframesof reference,nor a plea for criticalecumenicalism.The to the depth and the warringfactionsamongcriticsare, to me, a testament differences of human perception. or articleof faith, is tlhatthe understanding of a novel, My argument, the obverseof which is aestheticpleasure,is most meaningfullyachieved throughan analysisof words, sounds,rhythms,and ideas-that which the novel is. The meaningsuch an analysisyields is the rhetoricof fiction,a phrasewhich, of course,bringsto mind that brilliantand seminalbook by volumegermane to The GreatGatsby WayneC. Booth. The idea in Booth's is his conceptof "distance," "distance" between the author's perception,or moreaccurately, the normsof the novel, and the perception of the narrator; between the narrator's or, to put it anotherway, the "distance" perception and the reader's this If "distance" existswe have, to some deperception. and critics,as well as students,are reluctantto gree, an unreliablenarrator, this device since unreliable as Boothsays, "makestrongrecognize narrators, er demandson the reader's of inference than reliablenarrators do." powers he makes reference to The GreatGatsby,Boothdraws only cursory Although two conclusions,both of which, I submit,are wrong. He assertsthat Nick
has only a minor involvement in the events of the novel and that he "pro-

vides thoroughly reliableguidance."A moreextensivetreatment of Booth's is found in 'The Vision of Nick methodology Triple Carraway" by E. Fred Carlislein the Winter 1965-66 issue of Modern Fiction Studies. Carlisle corroborates Booth'serrorby judging Nick's perceptionas "mature[and] informed."

22

RMMLA BULLETIN

MARCH 1969

While my view of Nick Carraway is new, it is not original. In 1966 there appearedindependentlytwo studies remarkably similarin evidence cited and identicalin conclusions reached: "Against The GreatGatsby"by in the Autumn1966 issue of Criticism and the Thirteenth GaryScrimgeour chapterof Man's ChangingMasksby CharlesChild Walcutt. Scrimgeour sees the narrator's as a markof Fitzgerald's confusion;Walcutt unreliability sees it as partof the novel'smystery. Ratherthan summarize, I referyou to these sourceswhich examine the disparitybetween what Nick says and reliable what he does, and conclude that far from providing"thoroughly immoral. the narrator is and shallow,confused,hypocritical, guidance," If this view of Carraway is correct,the bulk of forty yearsof Gatsby in somewhatthe criticismatteststo our havingbeen taken in by Carraway same way that Carraway has been taken in by Gatsby. A hypothesisso and so provocative In short,I have criesout for furtherexploration. startling tried to see Nick's unreliability as an integralpart of the book by finding ways in which the normsof the novel are conveyedindependentof and in contradiction to the explanations offers. Carraway We may be temptedto overlook thosenormsand to acceptthe explanationsof a man who assertshis objectivity("I'minclinedto reserveall judgboastsof his virtues(tolerments"),admitshis shortcoming (snobbishness), ance and honesty),and desiresorderand morality("I wantedthe worldto be in uniform and at a sortof moralattention forever").But let us not be led into temptation of his father's is "in consequence" by one whose objectivity Nick that he has "been influence-theadvicethathas so indeliblyimpressed
turning it over in ... [his] mind ever since": "'just remember that all the

that you've had.'" In fact, people in this world haven'thad the advantages decenNick's advantages, as he later snobbishlyrepeats,are "fundamental cies"which are "parceled out unequallyat birth." Thus, an arrogant pride is revealedunderthe guise of objectivity and humility. Althoughhe boasts of his tolerance,he thinks,after seeing the limousine"drivenby a white in which sat threemodishnegroes,two bucksand a girl ... anychauffeur, can happennow ... anythingat all." His shallowhypocrisyis further thing underlinedwhen we recall that he has called Tom Buchanan's pseudoscientific belief in Nordicsupremacy "nibblingat the edge of stale ideas." Thisinstanceis but one of manyin which Nickhimselfdisplaysthe very in others. Nick'shonestyand moralresponsiqualitieshe findsreprehensible are manifested his by easy decisionto play the pandererfor Gatsby; bility in which he it was "sucha little thing." His response to a similarsituation is not involved,the affairbetweenTomand MyrtleWilson,is quite different: for the police." Yet when "my own instinctwas to telephoneimmediately the police shouldbe broughtin, Nick insteadbecomesan accompliceafter the fact by concealingDaisy's crime of manslaughter.His silence has an important bearingon the eventsof the novel; it resultsin Gatsby'smurder that Nick's and Wilson'ssuicide. We can hardlyaccept Booth'scontention involvement." role in the novel is one of "minor

NARRATION IN The Great UNrF,TJA,RTF

Gasby

23

To explorefurtherthe pertinenceof Booth'sconcept of "distance" to the novel, I shouldlike to compareit to Melville's"Bartleby the Scrivener." Criticshave frequentlycalled attentionto the influenceof Conradon Fitzgerald as well as the influenceof Melville on Conrad,thus suggestinga between Melville and Fitzgerald. In fact, I believe that possiblesimilarity Melville'sunreliablenarratorin Bartleby does shed light on Carraway. total negation,"I'd prefernot to"; Gatsby,impossible Bartlebyrepresents achievement:"'Can'trepeatthe past?... Why of courseyou canl"' Both narrators are simultaneously attractedto and repelled by the unequivocal absolutism to which they are exposed. We have the same "distance" between the narrator and Bartlebyas we have between Carraway and Gatsby. The inadequacyof both narrators is accountedfor by their shallow and concern for 'The easiest way is best," says order. morallyirresponsible Melville'snarrator.Bartlebyand Gatsbyrefuse to compromise no matter what the cost. Thus, to the narrators for whom facile compromise is a way of life, they are attractiveenigmas. Carraway,in short, is attractedto with the absurdities Gatsby'svision preciselybecause he has compromised which that vision exposes. For Nick, too, the easiest way is best; compromiseis his modus lie at the inquestis a markof "character." Nick operandi.Thus,Catherine's allowsWilson to be "reduced to a man derangedby grief in orderthat the case might remainin its simplestform." Nick continues,"But all this part of it [meaningthe moraldimensions of Daisy'scrime and its consequences] seemedremoteand unessential."What Nick sees as unimportant, we see as the novel Nick reveals more than appalling irresponsibility.Throughout he is awareof. He is unawareof the shallowness of the belief that "personality is a seriesof unbrokensuccessfulgestures."It is his easy conformity that dictateshis choice of vocation: "All [his] . . . aunts and unclestalked it over as if they were choosinga prep school .., and finallysaid 'Why ye-es.'" And besides"Everybody [he] ... knew was in the bond business." Nick believes that "life is much more successfullylooked at from a single window,"and his window is framedby shallowness, hypocrisy, immorality, and compromise.The window image pervadesthe novel. It is the limiting lens throughwhich Nick confronts experience("It is invariablysaddening to look throughnew eyes.") It is throughwindows (of trains, cars, and busses) that Nick views the ash heaps, Eckleburg's eyes, Wilson's station, his own middle west of tinsel and ornament, the green light, the pact between Daisy and Tom. By such devices Fitzgeraldreveals the norms of the novel. Or take that peculiarpassage in the conversation between Nick and Gatsby:
(Gatsby) "'I am the son of some wealthy people in the Middle West ...'" (Carraway) "'What part of the Middle West? . . " (Gatsby) "'San Francisco.'"

24

RMMLA BLLETIN

MARCH 1969

Nick'sresponseis "I see." Whatin fact does Nick see? Is our response to Gatsby's unbelievable the sameas the narrator's? ignoranceof geography So far as I know,the only commenton this passagesees it as "an aspectof the ridiculous"-whatever that means. We all note somethingfishy about house the Snells,Hammerheads, Gatsby's guests,particularly Belugas,Whitand both comic achieves effects baits, Fishguards. Obviously,Fitzgerald and seriousby makingpuns with names. I submitthat the connectionbetween Gatsbyand San Franciscois made by a pun more subtle and more thanthosemade on the namesof the houseguests.The name Gatsby serious is also a pun, Gatbeing the AngloSaxonwordfor gate, by the Scandanavian suffixmeaningtown or city of. Now I suspectthat a readercan get a good deal from the novel withoutrecognizingthe etymologyof Gatsby'sname, between Gatsbyand the City yet I would alsomaintainthat the connection of the Gate is not fortuitousand that our responseto Gatsby's apparent Thereis a good deal the same as the narrator's. faux pas is not necessarily that is fishy about Gatsbywhich Nick does not see. He seriouslyreports, for example, that Gatsbyas a young man had spent over a year "beatinghis as a clam-diggerand salmonway along the southshoreof Lake Superior yet we know, as Fitzgeraldmust have known, that Lake Superior fisher," containsneitheredible clams nor salmon. Once again there is distancebetween readerand narrator.But let me returnto the Gatsby/SanFrancisco business. The juxtaposition of Gatsby's originin the MiddleWest and San Francisco is a figurative a kind of spatialtelescoping of compression the frontier, of a temporalexperience.What was a fluid historical becomes phenomenon for our examination a staticimage embodiedin Gatsby. Obversely,Gatsby is a temporal of a spatialexperience:he is a descendantof the telescoping Dutch sailorsfor whom floweredthe freshgreenbreastof the New World. floweris a Daisy-and then thereis the light at the end of her dock Gatsby's must be green). (which legally shouldbe red but allegorically An even more obvious connectionbetween Gatsby and the romantic frontierinterpretation of the Americandream is his assumptionof a new identityin a new land, that identity springingfrom his romanticidealism (his "Platonic[dare I say Emersonian] conceptionof himself") and his exposureto Dan Cody (Daniel Boone and Buffalo Bill), that questing "a productof the Nevadasilverfields, of the Yukon,of every frontiersman, rush for metal since seventy-five."Further,Gatsby'sfather unknowingly revealsand Carraway reportsthat Jay has been nurturedon unknowingly the Ben Franklinmyth of success, his plan to achieve moral perfection inscribedon the flyleaf of HopalongCassidy. significantly It has, of course,become a criticalcommonplace to point out that the West is a spatialmetaphor of the historicalAmericanexperience,and that the image of the West in this novel providesa measurement of that experiI suggestthat, in additionto the ratherobvious deence. Parenthetically,

IN UNRELIABLE NARRATION

The Great Gatsby

25

tails just cited, Fitzgerald has compressed in the novel a judgment of still other elements of our heritage, for example, the eyes (blue and gigantic) of T. J. Eckleburg, that "wild wag of an oculist," suggest the transparent eyeball of Emerson bathed in the blithe air above "gray land and the spasms of bleak dust, ... a valley of ashes-a fantastic farm where ashes grow like wheat into ridges and hills and grotesque gardens; where ashes take the forms of houses and chimneys and rising smoke and finally, with a transcendent effort, of men who move dimly and already crumbling through the powdery air." The optimism of Emerson in the woods is measured by the twentieth century image of Eckleburg's eyes brooding over the solemn dumping ground. The name Eckleburg itself traced to its German roots means burg or city of nausea, disgust. Eckleburg is to Emerson what Wolfscheim is to the Dutch sailors. The edge of that wild expansive ocean from which the sailors first spied the "fresh-green breast of the New World" has become "the most domesticated body of salt water in the Western hemisphere, the great wet barnyard of Long Island Sound." Still another way by which we can distinguish "distance"between the norms of the novel and the narrator'sperception is to examine Nick's attitude toward Daisy, who for Gatsby is the embodiment of the American dream. To come right out with it I contend that Nick, too, is in love with Daisy. How else can we account for Nick's failure to recognize her vanity and stupidity? Nick is charmed by Daisy's laugh and irrelevant remark, which she thinks is very witty, "I'm p-paralyzed with happiness." He finds a "singing compulsion"in her voice, that "low thrilling voice ... that men who had cared for her found difficult to forget." "It was," Nick says, "the kind of voice that the ear follows up and down, as if each speech is an arrangement of notes that will never be played again." For example: Do youalways watchforthe longest dayof theyearandthenmissit? I always watch forthelongest dayof theyearandthenmissit. Daisy's mind is as vestigial as her husband's turning his garage into a stable is anachronistic. This bitter retrogressionof American idealism is not only the object of Gatsby's incarnation but also Carraway'sinfatuation. Else how could Nick describe Daisy's vapid anecdote of the butler's nose with these words:
For a momentthe last sunshinefell with romanticaffectionupon her glowing face; her voice compelledme forwardbreathlessly as I listened.

But, with characteristic unawareness, Nick compromises with his feelings by using Jordan Baker as a surrogate Daisy and by having an affair with the girl from New Jersey who works in the accounting office of Probity Trust. Nick tells us that he is enchanted by thinking of entering the lives

26

RMMLA BULLETIN

1969 MARCH

of romanticwomen and adds, "no one would ever know or disapprove." Andwhen the New Jerseygirl'sbrother mean looksin Nick's beganthrowing he lets the affair"blowquietly away." direction, In considering the novel as a criticism of the American dream,we have two mutuallyexclusiveinterpretations on identification with our depending or distancefromthe narrator's as mature point of view. If we see Carraway and informed, we believe with Nick that Gatsbyturnedout all right at the end, that the dreamis good,and that it is what has happenedto the dream, "whatfoul dustfloatedin the wakeof his dreams," thatis corrupt. We accept Nick'sjudgmentof Gatsby,"You're worththe whole damn bunch." Or to put it in the words of one critic who identifieswith Carraway, "[Gatsby] the unendingquest of the Americandream-foreverbetrayedin represents fact, yet redeemedin men's minds. Gatsby is great because his dreamhowevernaive, gaudy, and unobtainable-isone of the grand illusionsof man." we see If, on the otherhand, we recognizethe narrator's unreliability, that Nick'sknowledgeof Gatsby's and his belief that the dream corruption which he embodiesis "incorruptible," is a paradoxresolved only in our awarenessof Nick's last and most seriouscompromise with truth. Finally, his moral responsibility is facilely explainedas "provincial squeamishness" as he shakesTom Buchanan's hand, erasesa dirty word from the steps of attendsGatsby's house,and with his indomitable Gatsby's self-righteousness funeral. On the level of plot he knowsmorethan he tells, but on the level of the novel's rhetoriche tells more than he knows. In truth, dreamand object were never united, not even for the Dutch sailors. As Nick has panderedfor Gatsby,so Americahas "panderedin whispersto the Dutch sailors'eyes." In shortit is not what has happenedto the dream,but the dreamitself that is corrupt.Thereis here suggestedan important conflictin Americanfiction: Is our failure in not ascending the Big Rock Candy Mountainor is it in our belief in the existenceof the mountainitself? I submitthat the answermakesa difference. As I beganby alerting on you to the narrator's disarming ingenuousness me let to concludeby alertingyou his euphonious the firstpage of the novel, eloquencein the conclusion.If we botherto examinethe simple logic of coda, we find not a revelationof knowledge, awareness,or Carraway's foil to conceala seriouslyflawedand confused but a characteristic maturity, perception.
So we beaton, boats thecurrent, borne back against
ceaselesslyinto the past.

The vehicle of the metaphoris a moving body of water; the tenoris the then, indicatesdirectionand movement,past passageof time. The current, to future. If we beat on againstthe current,we are tryingto move toward the past, and if we are borneback, we are movinginto the future,not the
"past."